FILNER MUST END HOSTILITY TO OPENNESS

In a Friday editorial on Mayor Bob Filner’s most recent and seamiest scandal, we spoke of the importance of City Hall still being functional and getting things done as the controversy over Filner’s admitted poor treatment of women played out.

A great place to start would be on the issue of government openness. On the campaign trail last year, Filner over and over again touted the importance of transparency at City Hall. He related this need for openness to his conspiratorial theories about how decision-making historically has been made by San Diego’s elected leaders.

But at this point in Filner’s first year in office, it’s plain that he’s far more secretive than predecessor Jerry Sanders ever was. These past three weeks alone, we’ve seen two fresh examples.

The first example has do with the mayor’s recent whirlwind trip to France. On June 28, Filner told reporters that his trip to give a speech at Villepinte, near Paris, was paid for by a nonprofit group associated with the Iranian government resistance movement. He said he wouldn’t reveal the name of the group at the time because he wasn’t sure exactly what the name was.

Really? Using the claim of a faulty memory to avoid transparency? More than two weeks later, the mayor still can’t remember.

The second example has to do with claims against the city. Those are documents filed by people considering suing the city over injuries they allege they have suffered because of city negligence, such as cars damaged by potholes — or such as sexual harassment by a superior in city government.

Journalists used to be able to review these claims the day the came in. But last week, City Supervising Claims Representative Janice Ellis told a U-T Watchdog reporter that claims could only be viewed by the public if they were the subject of a formal records request.

Not only does this new stand betray the mayor’s claim to care about transparency, it’s probably not legal, according to one of the state’s top experts on government-openness laws.

“They are not free to demand a written request,” Terry Francke, general counsel for Californians Aware, told U-T Watchdog. “That much has been established in case law. And it’s equally clear that claims are public. That also comes from case law. They have no basis for any kind of a 10-day delay, because the only purpose of a 10-day delay is to allow a careful consideration of whether the request record is actually public and there’s no doubt about that. Claims are as public as city council agendas.”

We hope the mayor can take a break from his scandal damage-control efforts to right these wrongs. He should finally tell San Diegans who paid for his trip to France. And he should make it easier for San Diegans to find out who says their vehicle’s alignment got knocked out of whack by poorly maintained roads — or to find out which city employees say they have been verbally or physically harassed on the job.